In recent years, developers have created a variety of drawing and design systems that assist individuals in creating, editing, and displaying digital documents. Indeed, most conventional drawing and design systems provide individuals with guides and/or constraint tools that assist with the precise placement and alignment of an object (e.g., a subject object) within a digital document. For example, some conventional design systems provide “smart guides,” which help align a subject object to points of interest in the digital document. Some points include intersecting points of a digital document (e.g., the center or corner of a digital document) or points associated with other objects (e.g., a center or edge of another object).
In general, conventional design systems provide guides and constraint tools to help individuals achieve improved accuracy and precise alignment when creating, designing, and modifying objects within a digital document. Despite these and other advantages, there remains a number of problems with conventional design systems that provide guides and constraint tools.
For example, although conventional design systems can provide spacing guides that operate with a small number of objects, most conventional design systems are not scalable with digital documents that include a large number of objects. In particular, these conventional design systems suffer from severe performance issues as the number of objects in a digital document increases. For instance, as the number of objects increases, conventional design systems experience lag, jumpy movements, and delays. These problems are only exacerbated as a subject object moves within a digital document resulting in multiple sequential applications of a spacing guide. Indeed, although individuals and businesses frequently utilize digital documents with hundreds (or even thousands) of objects, in such circumstances many conventional design systems become bottlenecked and stop responding.
One notable reason for performance degradations in conventional design systems is that conventional design systems use algorithms having O(N2) complexity, where N represents the number of objects in a digital document. For example, in providing a spacing guide to a subject object in a digital document containing 1,000 objects, conventional design systems require approximately 106 (i.e., 1,0002 or 1,000,000) computations to determine how to evenly space the subject object with other objects within the digital document. Specifically, conventional design systems determine, for each pair of objects, whether the subject object is roughly located between the object pairing, and if so, how the subject object is to be adjusted to be equally located between the object pairing.
While the number of computations exponentially grows as the number of objects in a digital document increases, the number of computations further increases as an individual moves the subject object within a digital document (e.g., using a mouse or finger to drag the subject object). On average, a subject object moved within a digital document triggers 25 movement events, each of which corresponds to a position of the subject object. Thus, continuing the above example, as an individual moves a subject object within the digital document having 1,000 objects, conventional design systems perform 25 million (25×106) computations to provide a spacing guide for the subject object. Most modern computing devices cannot perform such massive numbers of computation in real-time without experiencing significant lag and bottlenecking.
These along with additional problems and issues exist with regard to conventional drawing and design systems and methods.